Rafael Nadal Out of French Open With Wrist Injury

PARIS — A downbeat tennis season dipped deeper into a minor key on Friday when Rafael Nadal, who has won the French Open nine times, withdrew from the tournament because of a left wrist injury.

The abrupt announcement sent shock waves through Roland Garros, where Nadal has cast the longest shadow across the red clay for more than a decade, winning more singles titles here than any other player in history.

The decision was all the more surprising because Nadal had advanced to the third round on Thursday with a typically lopsided 6-3, 6-0, 6-3 victory over Facundo Bagnis of Argentina. But Nadal said he played that match only after receiving a painkilling injection in his left wrist. He spoke at Friday’s news conference with the wrist in a blue brace. His spokesman Benito Perez Barbadillo later confirmed that the problem was an inflamed tendon sheath.

“One of the toughest press conferences of my career,” said Nadal, who was seeded fourth. He said he could no longer hit his signature shot — his whipping topspin forehand — without major pain.

“It’s obvious if it’s not Roland Garros, I will probably not take the risks of playing the first two days,” he said. “But it’s the most important event of the year for me, so we tried our best. We take risks yesterday. That’s why we played with anesthetic injection, so without feeling at all in the wrist. But you know when I am coming to Roland Garros, I am coming thinking about winning the tournament. To win the tournament, I need five more matches, and the doctor says that’s 100 percent impossible.”

Nadal’s withdrawal allowed his would-be opponent Marcel Granollers a walkover into the fourth round, and could make the road to the title considerably less arduous for No. 1 seed Novak Djokovic, who has yet to win the French Open and could have faced Nadal in the semifinals.

Nadal’s career has often been interrupted by injuries, above all by knee tendinitis. He also withdrew from the 2014 United States Open with a right wrist injury, which affected the left-handed-playing Nadal’s two-handed backhand. But Nadal said the injury to his left wrist was a new one. He said the trouble began in a quarterfinal victory May 6 against João Sousa during the Masters 1000 tournament in Madrid.

Nadal lost in the semifinals of that tournament to Andy Murray and said he used mesotherapy before that match to deaden the pain. He traveled to Barcelona the next day for medical tests and decided to play in the Masters 1000 event in Rome.

“The doctor told me that there is nothing really bad,” he said. “So I accept that, and I wanted to go to Rome and I went to Rome. I played only with anti-inflammatories.”

He lost to Djokovic in a high-quality quarterfinal and then returned to his home on Majorca, where the wrist resumed troubling him. He said it grew worse after he arrived here.

But Nadal, who has often played through pain and has had a resurgent season on clay after struggling, by his standards, in 2015, said he decided to play in Paris because he believed he could manage the problem.

“But the thing is yesterday night, I started to feel more and more pain,” he said. “And today in the morning, I feel that I could not move much the wrist.”

He said that he had a magnetic resonance imaging scan and other medical tests and that his longtime doctor, Ángel Ruíz-Cotorro, had advised him against continuing and told him that he risked a tear if he did so.

“If I continue to play, it will break, and that will mean months off the tour,” Nadal said.

“That’s the one next to that bump on the outer side of your wrist,” said Dr. Nicholas DiNubile, an American orthopedic surgeon who is a member of the United States Professional Tennis Association. “With the modern whip forehand and windshield-wiper type movement, it gets yanked a lot and can get strained, especially the way Rafa hits it.”

Wrist injuries have become a major problem in recent seasons. Juan Martín del Potro, the 2009 United States Open champion, has missed extended stretches of play. Dr. Richard Berger of the Mayo Clinic, who has operated three times on del Potro, explained in a telephone interview on Friday that the sheath is “a soft tissue tunnel” surrounding the tendon.

“If it tears, they are committed to a reconstruction, and that is going to take a long time for him to rehab,” Berger said of Nadal.

In the case of sheath inflammation, Berger said that immobilizing the wrist with a splint or cast was a normal course of treatment, along with the use of ultrasound and possibly a corticosteroid injection or oral anti-inflammatory medication. He said platelet-rich plasma injections — a treatment Nadal has used for his knees — were also an option.

“It depends how severe it is and which tendon it actually is, but I would say in general we’re looking at a recovery period of at least a month or six weeks,” Berger said of an inflamed tendon sheath.

Nadal did not rule out playing at Wimbledon, which is set to begin June 27. But that could be a stretch, particularly with the emphasis he has placed on competing in the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in August.

It has been a traumatic season for tennis. In January, concern about match fixing led to an independent review of the sport’s anticorruption program. In March, Maria Sharapova, one of tennis’s biggest stars, was suspended after testing positive for meldonium in January. It was also revealed that Denis Pitner, a Croatian umpire, had worked at the United States Open in 2015 as a linesman after being suspended in the wake of a corruption inquiry.

Roger Federer, the 34-year-old Swiss star, also has had a deflating season, having knee surgery — the first operation of his career — after injuring himself off the court. Citing insufficient preparation, Federer withdrew from the French Open, ending his record streak of 65 consecutive Grand Slam tournament appearances.

“I would have preferred that this happen last year, but you can’t choose,” Nadal said. “When you feel you’re on the right track and you feel you have truly made the efforts to make that happen, it’s very difficult to accept that you have to withdraw.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Injured Nadal Withdraws and Leaves Paris in Shock. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe